Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/421

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Lanfranc had held, and in which during these dreary years he had no successor, was a position wholly unlike that of the class of bishops to which we are now getting accustomed, royal officials who received bishoprics as the payment of their temporal services. It was equally unlike that of the statesman-bishops of later times, who might or might not forget the bishop in the statesman, but whose two characters, ecclesiastical and temporal, were quite distinct and in no way implied one another. An archbishop of those times was a statesman by virtue of his spiritual office; he was the moral guardian and moral mouth-piece of the nation. The ideal archbishop was at once saint, scholar, and statesman; of the long series from Augustine to Lanfranc, some had really united all those characters; none perhaps had been altogether lacking in all three. Hence the special care with which men were chosen for so great a place both before and for some time after the time with which we are dealing. The king's clerks, his chancellor, his treasurer, even his larderer, might beg or buy some bishopric of less account; but, seventy years after this time, the world was amazed when King Henry bethought him of placing Chancellor Thomas, not in the seat of Randolf of Durham or Roger of Salisbury, but in the seat of Ælfheah, Anselm, and Theobald. The surprise which was then called forth by what was looked on as a new-fangled and wrongful nomination to the archbishopric of Canterbury may help us to judge of the surprise and horror and despair which came over the minds of men, as it became plain that the wish, perhaps